Free Web Development Books

“The Shape of Design – A fieldguide for makers . A love letter to design”, by Frank Chimero, is a meditation on the design process and the work’s potential effect when released. Read it online or download in multiple formats. …

This book is freely available in multiple formats as part of O’Reilly’s Open Book Project. This is the first book that applies the REST design philosophy to real web services. …

Butterick’s Practical Typography, by Matthew Butterick, will make you a bet­ter typographer. Read it online. …

This free eBook, Dreamweaver CS6 Basics, is a series of lessons intended to help people learn the basics of Adobe Dreamweaver. Covers versions CS5, 5.5, 6. …

Read “Web Audio API: Advanced Sound for Games and Interactive Apps”, by Boris Smus, online for free. This book aims to give a high-level overview of a number of important features of the Web Audio API, but is not an exhaustive survey of every available feature. It is not intended as a comprehensive guide, but as an easy starting point. …

Download this free ebook, “UX Design for Startups” by Marcin Treder. It contains 127 pages of real-life based advice and list of +60 UX design tools. …

“Interactive Data Visualization for the Web: An Introduction to Designing With D3” is available online on O’Reilly Media’s Open Feedback Publishing System. Create and publish your own interactive data visualization projects on the Web, even if you have no experience with either web development or data visualization. It’s easy with this hands-on guide.

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“Thinking Web: Voices of the Community” is a collaborative book by the SitePoint Community. In this book, 11 members from SitePoint Forums share their knowledge on topics related to web design and development. It’s available for free in pdf format. …

“Developing Modern Mobile Web Apps”, by Microsoft, provides guidance on building mobile web experiences using HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. It is a patterns & practices guide. …

Read the patterns included in the book; “Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience”, published by O’Reilly Media, for free online. The patterns in this collection are social design patterns (a.k.a. social user experience design patterns). They are interaction pattern for people designing social interfaces. …